Industry studies show that industrial plants lose between 3-8 % of their production profit due to unplanned upsets or abnormal events. More than 50 % of these incidents happen due to a lack of situational awareness.
(Source: ASM Consortium)
What is the definition of an unplanned upset or abnormal situation for a production facility?
Any unplanned and undesired event that prevents completion of a task causing a risk to health, safety, production or environment. The cause may be blockage of a pipe, failure of an instrument, and so on. These kinds of unplanned and undesired events cannot be handled by the control and safety systems alone and requires human intervention by a control room operator to return to a normal state.
Seen from the operator’s perspective, the number of information points have increased significantly over the last years, due to more integrated and advanced systems. Simultaneously, the number of operators for each loop has decreased.
Operators have not been given any new tools to understand this information, or to make decisions based on the information provided.
Control Room Assistant
This is why we have created a software to help operators in their day-to-day work. The software runs in real time as an assistant, always on the alert. With live plant data as evidence, the model presents a real time HAZOP to the control room operators for better decision-making, which reduces losses and avoids shutdowns. The result is an increased production output by 5%, with reduced flaring and increased safety.
HAZOP Assistant
Our model identifies root causes, forecasts consequences, and suggests remediation plans when hypothetical errors are injected. The end result is improved HAZOP quality and less time consumed. Design and operational knowledge is stored for future use.
Can you imagine a control room without alarms? Kairos is an operator's assistant, ensuring situational awareness.
The vision for Kairos is to enable the human operator to handle complex situations for more fields or plants without interruption, in a safer and more efficient manner.
The project was started in 2012 and is currently a development project under the name AlarmTracker. Kairos Technology develops the solution in close partnership with The Technical University of Denmark, The Danish Hydrocarbon Research and Technology Center, Total and ConocoPhillips, with support from The Norwegian Research council as a part of the Demo2000 programme.
The first live system is being tested offshore for ConocoPhillips at the Judy Platform and will be followed by a Total pilot test.
How does Kairos work?
The technology embedded in our Kairos products combines deterministic modelling with deviation propagation analysis and artificial intelligence. The model utilizes human experience along with the plant design parameters, and effectively captures and makes explicit and tacit knowledge available.
What it all comes down to is providing the operator with better decision support. This is mainly done by using Multilevel Flow Modeling. MFM is used to diagnose malfunctions and create a counteraction before the situation evolves. Kairos uses MFM to display the root cause and future consequences of the situation, if no action is taken.
Through state-of-the-art visualisation, modelling and algorithms, Kairos gives the operator superior decision-support for immediate counteractions on abnormal events.
Expected results
The business case for Kairos is to increase production output by 5%, reduce flaring and increase safety.
Kairos enables you to:
- Understand all situations and therefore cut time-delay before action (Situational awareness)
- Deal with the cause(s) of the abnormal situation, not only the alarms/symptoms (Root Cause)
- See developing scenarios from the abnormal situation (Consequences)
- Take the recommended action to resume normal situation (Counter Action Planning)
- Deal with the upsets up-front
...before they lead to an incident or complete shutdown.
Kairos Technology is a startup company that develops innovative and disruptive technology within the oil & gas industry.